Heh. I know what it's like to have an unhappy tomtoe....

I could have sworn I posted something. Ah well. I will likely have the seam repaired and continue the search since they also have some wear around the ankles.

Hey y'all. Checking back in after a rather strange, but mostly pleasant, Christmas weekend.

My x-mas saga, copied in part from my lj:

Things didn't start off so well. My brother G flew in from Moscow on Wednesday. A long, fairly grueling trip to begin with. Then he had to connect through Cincinnati....More than 48 hours lost, and pretty much all our holiday planning/shopping thrown into disarray since most of x-mas eve day was spent at the airport trying to track down his luggage (along with that of every single other person on his flight).

Christmas eve dinner was amusing, if only because we're about 40% through a move so we found ourselves missing some key equipment. After a three-way argument over whether to serve the cauliflower in a loaf pan, a pasta bowl, or a pie-plate, it was an easy step from there to scoop the green beans into a vase and send 'em on to the table...

Filling stockings was equally, um, creative. My sister and I (mostly her) had picked up a couple of little things, but ending up filling things out with batteries and diet cokes. It's just possible we were losing it by that point. Oh, and we only had two stockings, which someone gave us, so we improvised with a backpack and one of those fancy wine bottle bags for the others. The tree was a gold tinsel garland that H bought last week with some idea of wearing it to the Packer game, pinned up over the window in the outline of a tree.

Next morning presents - well, a few, since most of the shopping got put off, though we did have a good supply of Bengals gear - and then I managed to fake my way through my mom's german pancake recipe, the actual recipe being in Chicago, which is our traditional breakfast. Lots of lying on the couch, lots of football, and then we decided that Christmas dinner was beyond us so we loaded up in the car and went out for Indian food. Stopped on the way home and rented Friday, and that brought the oddest Christmas ever to a close.

I too have an unhappy toe. I whanged it before I left, and the surface of it is numb on the outside edge, down the foot about another 2 inches. Figure I smacked a nerve. It isn't painful, just really weird.

OK, pictures:

Dominic and the birthday cake (it had dinosaurs. He LOVES dinosaurs.)

Someone was sleepy

Dominic monopolizing his grandfathers in his Wiggles pjs. I may never recover from the Wiggles earworms.

MINE!!!! No one is allowed to drive it, and it is full of little people. It was a gift "from" his dad. Hah. I'll eventually upload the shot of my brother opening it and the look on his wife's face. Priceless.

I'm a little tired of the malicious urination.

Well there's a phrase you don't see very often.

ita, do you think your folks would like going to see Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement at the Regent Showcase Cinema on La Brea? It's a beautiful old-timey arthouse theater that's as much an attraction as the movies playing there, and it's on the same street as both Pink's Hot Dogs and the House that Kermit Built. (I'm not kidding - Jim Henson Studios has a big statue of Kermit over the gate!)

Well there's a phrase you don't see very often.

It's a tacit crisis, along with malicious vomitation and malicious turdination.

Whoo-hoo! CEO called, and instructed us to close the office at four for the rest of the week! This never happens - he's more the type to call at 5:25 on x-mas eve with complicated projects that Must Go Out Tonight.

Timelies,

Happy Birthday, Emily!

Ouch, TomS!

Continuing the saga of the leaking waterbed, around 6am, the jury-rigged syphon stopped pulling water. I tried to get it restarted without success, then said screw it and passed out on the couch. Since the water wasn't draining anymore, I just had to hope it wouldn't shift.

Of course, my boss then paged me around 8:20 asking when I'd be in. I swear, getting woken up out of a deep sleep after only two hours is ten times worse than not sleeping at all. I explained the situation (which I had done to the night person when I called in originally) and went back to lie down on the couch. 10 minutes later I got another page from work. I called the person back, again explained my situation and went back to bed yet again. I can only assume at the night shift person I talked to wrote a completely uninformative e-mail or forgot to send one at all.

I finally woke up around noon, called a bunch of waterbed places, found one that was open and picked up a new matress, liner and drain/fill kit. I'm out another $200+. Ugh.

In the meantime I've got the drainage kit doing it's thing. Hopefully the mattress while be empty enough to move in a few hours

t, my friend called from NO on Christmas to tell me it was snowing (I heard from a cousin that Houston got some too) and I thought of you and Dana.

It was surreal. Ice. Falling from the sky. In New Orleans. First time there's been snow in 15 years, and first time on Christmas Day in nearly 50.